


and girls grow up to be women

by arbitrarily



Category: Fargo (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-15 18:43:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5795677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“He was supposed to marry my sister, you know.” </i> </p><p>Betsy is thirteen when Lenore first calls Lou her boyfriend. And that's just fine by her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and girls grow up to be women

**Author's Note:**

> There's some timeline fudging happening here on my part in the name of simplicity, lol. According to The Internet™, Molly was born in 1975, which would make her four during Season Two, which is set during 1979. It's noted several times though in Season Two that she is six. Additionally, Lou talks in detail about the evacuation of Saigon that occurred in 1975, so WHO KNOWS WHEN MOLLY WAS BORN, and by extension when Lou and Betsy got married (my brain started hurting when I began questioning when exactly he was deployed to Vietnam for his two tours of duty). Barring time travel being a part of the _Fargo_ universe (SEASON THREE?????), I just kinda hand-waved any potential timeline-based problems. 
> 
> In sum, IT'S JUST A FLYING SAUCER, ED. WE GOTTA GO.

 

 

 

“He was supposed to marry my sister, you know.”   
“Lenore. The older.”  
“After high school. She used to say, _I’m gonna marry that boy someday_.  But then there was Vietnam, and he joined up, and she never was very good at waitin’.  
So he got me – the dud.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A BRIEF MESSAGE FROM OUR NARRATOR ––

Betsy knew: her sister was in love with the boy who would grow up to be Lou Solverson by virtue of convenience. She also knew there were worse reasons to love a boy (not yet a man) than that. 

Betsy lived in Luverne her entire life. Lou, too. She used to consider the possibilities of leaving Luverne, the singular way youth restructures the world from round to flat, easily and misleadingly navigable as fingers skip across the pages of an atlas – from Minnesota to Morocco to Australia in the space of three leaps. However, Betsy would not leave Luverne, and Lou would return to Luverne, but, as narrator, we have gotten ahead of ourselves.

For this is the story of Betsy Larsson, a hard girl, who despite, or perhaps because of, her own resilience was filled to the brim with pragmatic optimism, though rarely idealism. There was a difference between the two, and even at fifteen, sixteen, twenty-six, her deathbed not a decade later, she knew this to be true. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betsy is thirteen when Lenore first calls Lou her boyfriend. 

Lenore and Lou, Lou and Lenore – even the grammatical forces of alliteration saw fit to make clear these are two people who belong to one another. And that’s fine by Betsy. 

(What Betsy doesn’t know, and what Lou and Lenore certainly don’t know, is that they will break up that June only to resume their high school romance after Lenore spends a summer working the Tastee-Freez and he visits some long distance relatives seen once, or twice if lucky, a decade in Montana).

The Larsson girls are at that peculiar age, two years difference between them that feels more like twenty-five, where sisters serve as a constant source of conflict. Lenore and Betsy have never been very much alike. Both are sharp and observant girls, but Lenore has the bad habit of letting those same traits skew towards a guilt-seeking skepticism and suspicion – a girl who looks at the world as if there is a finite number of resources and each and every thing that comes into her possession must be guarded carefully. Must be treated as if there is not another, as if it could be lost.

That is Lenore at fifteen with Lou: each moment shared with him is hoarded as her own. 

“You have a boyfriend?” That’s what Betsy says, arms crossed, as she stands in Lenore’s doorway. She’s never actually seen Lenore with Lou, but she’s overheard Lenore’s one-sided conversations on the phone. Lenore calls her nosy, but Betsy thinks the better word is _observant_.

The curtains over the bedroom window flutter, Lenore’s arm bent, free hand clutching her elbow, a cigarette lifted to the open window. Later in life, Betsy will say she lost her taste for rebellion by living vicariously through Lenore. Lenore’s bedroom is painted a light blue, contrasts with Betsy’s own pale yellow room across the hall, both an exercise in organized chaos – the clutter of drugstore makeup and cheap perfume on Lenore’s dresser, the stack of books Betsy keeps on the floor next to her bed. The stack is always there; she has trained herself to avoid it when she springs out of bed each morning, the bed pressed against the wall, only one side to exit, never a wrong side of the bed for her to wake up on and blame.

“Jealous?” Lenore says as she rises, and then she shuts the door. 

Betsy is not jealous. In fact, she can’t fathom the appeal of keeping a boy like that. She doesn’t see a point or a need for it. Why bother. There’s too much to do – a book report due on Monday ( _The Lord of the Flies;_ “we have a disharmony in our natures,” is the only line she has written across the top of the page) and a friend of a friend’s birthday party Friday (a sleepover at the home of and in honor of the unfortunately and not coincidentally named Laverne from Luverne) and if the weather holds, she’s going ice-fishing with their dad on Sunday. 

There is no room, she decides, for anything else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“So, uh, how’s school going for you then?”

Betsy shrugs at the question, more intrigued by the nervous way Lou asks the question – like a colt on unsteady legs – than the question itself. 

“It’s good,” she says around a mouthful of runny eggs. She swallows. “You guys graduating soon, huh?”

“Mm-hm,” he says.

He’s a senior in high schooland so is Lenore. Betsy is a sophomore. Lou’s well-known at school – he runs track in the spring, contentedly sits on the bench during football season. Handsome in a way that borders too close to beautiful, and if Betsy thinks about it long enough she stumbles into an ugly self-consciousness about the adjectives that could be used to describe her. She doesn’t care to think that way, so she doesn’t. 

Both Betsy and Lou are seated at the Larssons’ kitchen table. Lou comes by for Sunday breakfasts some times, and it’s especially nice on the Sunday mornings Dad’s at the station. Betsy had passed Lenore on her way down the stairs, rollers still in Lenore’s hair as she scurried into the bathroom.

Betsy watches him raise a fork to his mouth. He’s got a good mouth she decides, something worth a girl getting excited about. She thinks it without even pausing to consider what precisely it is a girl would be getting all excited over when it comes to a boy’s mouth (not a boy, but Lou, and not just any mouth, but his), the same way girls dreamt about The Beatles or The Stones or any other abstractly innocent but lust-tinged thought that might enter a girl’s head.

So she doesn’t so much as have a crush on him (hand to god, she’d swear it up and down) but a teenage fascination. There’s something solid and good about him, something grown, that makes him interesting to Betsy. That sets him apart from the boys in her geometry class or the boys she slow dances with at the spring formal, all elbows and nervous sweaty hands. 

She likes how his hands look spread across his thighs when he sits on their couch in the TV room, the same couch she curls up on to watch _Lost in Space_ or _Get Smart_ or old episodes of _The Donna Reed Show_ in her bathrobe. Indecent to share like that, she thinks. 

“Pass the ketchup, would you?” she says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betsy is a careful girl, but when Bobby Sobchak of the debate club takes her out to the movies and then drives her back home in his pop’s old pick-up with the rusted out fender, she presses her mouth firm and tight against his own. She’s sixteen. The truck’s idled at a red light. The red light makes his ears glow that much pinker. Makes Betsy clutch her hands in her lap as she eyes him askance, but the boy doesn’t say anything. He just stares bright-eyed ahead at the traffic stop and Betsy just looks farther down a barrel that reads a lot like disappointment. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lenore looks like something out of one of their mother’s romance novels. Supine on the love seat in the sitting room, her knees bent over the arm of it, a hand raised to her forehead like she’s checking for a temperature. “I was gonna marry that boy,” she says, all swan song and botched intentions. She can blame Richard Nixon for that one, Betsy thinks. 

Lou had proposed to Lenore before he was deployed for Vietnam. Lenore said yes. 

But, then, not terribly long after, Lenore sent a Dear John letter Lou’s way, all the way across the ocean, to let him know – amidst what Betsy can only imagine as green and muck and the kinds of horrible things men like her father feel they have to hold close to keep from spreading – she met someone else. Betsy doesn’t care for that phrasing. It feels insincere. People were always meeting other people. Just the way of the world, too many folks in it. No way a person knew every other soul in it. What had happened was that Lenore chose to be with someone else. That’s what happened.

Dad always likes to say that Lenore can’t keep her eye on the ball. And it’s true, Betsy supposes. Walk outside her line of sight, and you’re liable to go forgotten. Betsy can attest to that, if only for the number of times Lenore has left her behind at school, forgetting that she owed Betsy a ride home, too. Forgetting Betsy in sum. 

“You gonna send him back the ring too?” Betsy had asked at breakfast, her mouth too sharp. She drummed her fingers on the kitchen table. Lenore watched her careful over the rim of her glass of orange juice, her fingers bare. Neither Larsson girl was surprised at Betsy’s tone. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lou still writes back to Lenore. Maybe it’s out of habit. Maybe it’s because he needs something to do with his hands. At first, Lenore has the grace to feel guilt or a less vocal cousin to it, and she snatches the letters up as they arrive, takes them to her bedroom. And then the letters start to pile up with all the other mail the Larsson home accumulates. 

Betsy yields to temptation. She opens one. She reads it. She finds that Lou writes the way he talks: straight-forward and certain, grimly wry, yet still warm. She can hear his voice as she reads, her mouth cracking open into a grin despite the fact nothing he writes (to Lenore, not to her) is objectively funny in the least.

She sticks the letter back into the carefully opened envelope and leaves it with the rest of the mail. It’s still there the next morning, abandoned by Lenore, and so Betsy yields again: she takes it as her own. 

Betsy weighs it. She tells herself: she feels bad her sister dumped him. She weighs that final line of the letter: _I haven’t heard from you in some time, and that’s fine. I can understand that. I hope you don’t find my letters an unwanted burden and know I do not expect a response. Simply put, I find some peace in talking to someone who knows me and knew me before all this. Give your family my best. With love, Lou_

A few days later, she sits down at the desk in her bedroom.

_Dear Lou_ , she writes, and then she pauses. _Dear Lou_ , what? It’s not like she has never had a conversation alone with Lou – she’s had plenty – but it was always like she was an accessory, a prelude. Now, she thinks, it’s like trying to turn a side dish into the main course. Christ. _You’ll have to forgive me_ , she scribbles quick, before she loses her nerve, _and by extension my nosy nature, but in the cozy confines of the Larsson homestead (read: cramped) I stumbled upon your letters. And, yes, they are addressed to Lenore, and, no, I am not her, but, gosh, Lou, I thought to myself: I miss that guy, you should say hello. So here I am, I suppose. Missing you. Writing you. Saying hello._

She stops again. Her mouth stretches into a closed-mouth grin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They strike up a correspondence. Betsy tells him about the goings-on back home, and he tells her about the war and about his men, his letters all opaque and near terrifying in their formality at first, but bits of himself filter through. He gets more and more casual with her, reflecting the tone she had tried to establish at the start. With each passing letter he becomes less Lou, Lenore’s Boyfriend (well, Ex-Fiancee) and more, Lou, Friend of Betsy. 

She regrets it, sometimes, this friendship. She understands Lenore, just a little. There’s a weight tied to caring about someone over there. Everyone knows someone over there, a shared community all holding its breath. She has never felt she was on the best of terms with the Lord, but she finds herself making small prayers, almost as a nervous tic. _Dear Lord, protect him_ , she will think as she stops by the butcher to pick up pork chops for dinner, the bell dinging overhead as she exits. She bargains, as if that has ever earned a person what they wanted – the snow up to her knees as she pushes the shovel in front of her, scraping against ice: _Lord, keep him safe, and I promise I will be better._

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lou comes home to Luverne in 1975, after the evacuation of Saigon. 

The last letter Betsy receives from him is brief and hastily written, his handwriting uncharacteristically sloppy, his words running into each other. The letter makes her anxious, even as she watches the news, the unfolding of the evacuation of Saigon. He never writes to her about military operations, of course he doesn’t, but the fear is obvious in his last letter. The fear, the exhaustion. Desperation. 

He writes, _They say it won’t be long until we’ll be headed home, and few things give a man’s mind some rest like the knowledge this will all be over soon. That, and word from you. The thought of you. I will see you soon. I love you. Lou_

He doesn’t mean that, she tells herself. She tells herself that over and over again. He’s lonely, he’s frightened, for all she knows there’s a whole list of women back home he writes to and says the same goddamn thing. She knows that’s a lie, knows it’s uncharitable to even think of Lou like that, and she kicks herself for it, rereads that line again – _I love you. Lou_ – feels her chest go tight, averts her gaze from Lenore at Sunday dinner, looks instead at the new ring on her sister’s finger, looks instead inside herself, looks at the ceiling as she lays in her bed, as she whispers aloud, _I love you, Lou_.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe he wrote it because writing it like that didn’t count. She couldn’t see his face, he couldn’t see hers, he didn’t have to say it aloud, he was thousands of miles away from her. 

Maybe it’s as Dad would say – it’s on the record, but it’s inadmissible. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lou comes home to Luverne in 1975. He doesn’t come by the house, but Betsy runs into him in town. It’s late, approaching evening, and she has a bag of groceries balanced on her hip, the bus stop at the end of the block. 

And there he is, solid-shouldered and standing there like something she could have invented.

“Oh, wow, would you look at you,” she says. “Heard you’d come back and all, but, well. It’s real nice to see you. In the flesh.” He flashes a quick smile that makes his eyes crinkle. Christ, he looks old. But hasn’t he always looked old to her? In a good way? Like there’s this whole other world of experience out there, and he’s dialed into it, he knows it, he knows how the world works. She smiles back at him.

“It’s good to see you, too,” he says, and then. Nothing. She hears the bus pull up behind them, but it’s. Well, it’s real funny but she’s having a real hard time taking her eyes off him, now that he’s here and alive and in front of her. It feels a bit, she thinks, like a not-so-minor miracle. 

“I think that was my ride just left,” she says, jerking her head towards the bus as it pulls away. Before she can stop herself, she hears herself rambling. Rambling at him about how she’s taken on hours at the library, the new location, down by the post office, and the car she’s driving which used to be the car Lenore drove wouldn’t start, something about a spark plug or she’s just guessing, she might just like to say the word spark plug, it sounds more exciting than it really is, don’t you think? She shifts her weight and the weight of the groceries before Lou finally takes them from her, guilt compounding his delayed chivalry as she keeps repeating, “it’s nothing, it’s nothing.”

A pause stretches, awkward and chasm-like between them. He looks good with her groceries, she thinks. 

“What’d you say you give a girl a ride home then, huh? I think you know the way.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

His car idles at the curb alongside the Larsson home. 

“Thank you,” he says, the words halting, “for the letters.”

It’s funny – how much simpler this was in letters. How fragile and unnavigable something so simple as a conversation with him feels. Funny how a man so sure doesn’t know a damn thing to do with her. Hesitation in every bit of him, like he has to keep himself in check when it comes to her. 

“No need,” she says. And then she adds with a shrug: “The war effort,” like that’s a thing worth saying or even close to the truth. 

She crosses her legs at the knee, uncrosses them just as fast.

“Dad’ll be real pleased to see you too, you know.”

Lou’s eyes go a little wide, like he’s been caught out at something awful. “Your dad?”

“Yeah, sure. Think he might’ve always liked you a bit better than he ever liked Lenore.” It’s a joke but Lou’s not laughing. She is, a delicate, nervous sound as she looks down at her hands.

“That’s – sure. That’s real nice to hear.” He clears his throat. His gaze keeps shifting down to her mouth, and suddenly, Betsy thinks that maybe she hasn’t done enough in her life to prepare her for him. For this, whatever this is. Shift in the tension between them, strangers in a different capacity. 

His voice is low when he says, “I don’t want to talk about your father right now,” and it’s her turn for her eyes to go wide.

And then, it’s just that easy: Lou leans forward and he takes her face in his hands and he kisses her. He doesn’t kiss her the way she thought he might (and she’s thought about it, she’s thought about it with an imaginative dedication that’s, if she’s being honest, frankly embarrassing) but instead rough and desperate, his mouth hot and open against her own. She cranes her neck and she kisses him back, her front tooth snagging on his bottom lip as he just as abruptly pulls away from her.

Lou’s breath sounds like her breath (noisy and uneven) and he braces his hands on the steering wheel and stares out ahead down her street. She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth as she watches him and thinks she can still taste him. The streetlights cast his face in shadow and she watches him, a familiar stranger, the rise and fall of his shoulders. Like he’s trying to keep himself in control, like he wouldn’t be able to stop himself again. In that moment, Betsy can picture it: Lou, alone, picturing her. Wanting her. Wanting her the same way she has wanted him – directionless and all-encompassing. 

_I love you. Lou._

So she reaches over to him. She grips him by the front of his jacket in two fists and she likes the way his eyebrows raise, all satisfied surprise. She presses her mouth to his, soft and gentle, the opposite of how he kissed her, her eyes open the entire time. “You should gimme a call, don’t you think,” she says and then she pops the passenger side door open. 

She forgets the groceries in his backseat. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They are married that November.

That November, an early blizzard works its way through Luverne, knocking the power out at the hotel where their wedding is held. The entire building is freezing cold and Lou fucks her in the coat check, can’t wait, the hem of Betsy’s wedding dress stained from the salt and snow of the parking lot, her body bent between his and the wall and she thinks to herself: this is where I always want to be. The day is cold, the hotel too, but Lou’s mouth is hot and hers and she laughs into him while Lou makes these breathless incredulous sounds, heated puffs of air escaping his mouth, traveling lower to the hinge of her jaw. She’s almost resentful when he comes – she wants to stay like this longer, longer and always, stay in this moment and in this coat check as long as humanly possible. 

She lets her dress fall down over her hips and her legs and her feet. “Best hurry back – I wanna get me a piece of that cake,” she says to him over her shoulder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They slept together for the first time at the tiny apartment he had downtown above the shoe shop. A small place that she’d move into once they’re married, but she didn’t know that yet. She didn’t know when she’d marry him but perhaps it was a Larsson-based foresight: much like her sister, she thought, she knew – I’m gonna marry that boy someday. 

He made the two of them dinner, nothing fancy, and after – leaving the dishes in the sink and a barely touched bottle of wine on the table – they had sex. 

Any knowledge Betsy had of Lou Solverson in the biblical sense she gleaned secondhand. Eavesdropping on her sister, sneaking peeks at the ill-attended diary Lenore kept and kept poorly hidden on the bookshelf next to her record collection. That had been how Betsy found it in the first place: an accident that she reinterpreted as happenstance and therefore an excuse to open it and skim the first page and then pore over the infrequent missives that followed. She listened in high school when Lenore had her best friend Donna Llewyn sleep over. Lenore’s bedroom was attached to the bathroom the girls shared and it was easy for Betsy to sit there, in the empty bathtub in her pajamas, as she eavesdropped on her sister and Donna Llewyn. Truth be told, everything – including later rectified misinformation – about human sexuality she learned this way. She listened as Lenore talked about Lou. How he kissed her with an open mouth. How he used his tongue. How he put his hands over and then under her sweater. How he tried to be a gentleman but forgot the steps once she got his belt open. Betsy had listened in, absorbing all the information with a note of not-fully-understood detachment. She felt like an anthropologist, curious to learn more.

She learned more. She learned how frantic he can be with his hands, how even though she wasn’t a virgin and neither was he, it still could feel like something brand new, something monumental. He wrapped a hand around her thigh and held her legs open for him and she said his name in the funniest way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You’re a real tough customer, aren’t you,” Lou had said. He said it before he kissed her in his tiny kitchen, Betsy with a dirty plate in her hand. Betsy can’t remember what she had said to him. Something acid and sharp, but her eyes had been warm and bright. Standing so close to her, his face had studied hers, like there was so much about her that surprised him. Like there was a limited time for him to learn it. Like there’s never going to be enough time for everything they could want from each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

She told Lenore about Lou before she married him. She told Lenore about Lou in the Larsson family kitchen, the morning of the Fourth of July. Betsy was shucking corn and Lenore was pouring a can of maraschino cherries into the ambrosia.

“My Lou?” Lenore had said. Betsy could feel her own patience exhausted as she ripped at an ear of corn, a bone-deep irritation that Lenore would even think she had the right to say a thing like that.

“You got yourself a man, Lenore. And you left this one behind. Can’t be mad about that.”

“I can be, and I am.”

“But you don’t have to be. This isn’t about you.” And then Betsy said: “I love you. And you know you love me.”

“Oh, sure. I just don’t like you much right now is all.”

Betsy shrugged after a pause. “I can live with that.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lou gets a call in the middle of the night. A drunk wrapped his car around a tree. It’s a cold night and Betsy stretches as he goes, reaching for him, half-awake, feels the tips of his fingers drag through first her hair and then down her cheek, her arm, the lingering grasp of their fingertips. She curls into his warm side of the bed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lou's a state trooper now. He’s a good cop even if he brings the work home with him. On the good nights, he likes to pick her brain.

She used to do the same sort of thing with her dad. She’d make him breakfast and sit at the kitchen table while he ate her overcooked eggs and burnt bacon and they’d talk about his cases. Those were what her dad likes to call the better years on account of the fact there weren’t that many cases, not in need of solving. The murders that happened were still tragedies but they made their own morbid sort of sense: angry man with a bottle, sad wife with the bad husband, the blown traffic stop, a gambling debt gone belly-up and then belly-open. There was no mystery to it, nothing in need of solving. Instead, her father would invent his own mysteries for her, and when her cleverness came to match his own he turned to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, the like, and they would read aloud while she topped up his coffee, poured herself a cup of her own as her dad feigned dramatic ignorance to the cup she drank black and then asked her, “Now you tell me, kid, who you think gone and done it.”

She’s got experience. She’s got a good ear for the world and its troubles. Her mother used to tell her that Betsy took after her father’s mother – that cast-iron stomach for the frontier. Those women had neither the time nor the patience for weakness. Betsy’s mother used to say she saw that same thing in her. “What about you, Ma?” Betsy would ask her. “I’m a city girl, hat to heels, soft belly in between,” she’d say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the bad nights –

He wears that war as his own goddamn shadow. Most of the time, he keeps it behind him, in tandem step with him. But other times. Well other times, it catches him.

Tonight, when he comes home, Lou smells of beer and secondhand smoke and the chill outside; it makes her want to breathe him in, hold him in her lungs. 

“You can talk to me,” is what she says to him.

He gives her a quick shake of his head, a grim sort of half-smile. “I don’t bring that home to you.”

Betsy curls her hands into fists and rests them on her hips. “Lou Solverson, you’re not a dog with a bone, bringing me home scraps. I’m not gonna throw ‘em out and then tell you, go fetch. I’m not gonna,” and she pauses then, shakes her head. “You talk to me. You tell me things. Or if you haven’t got the words you just tell me, Betsy, I don’t have the words, and that’s okay, too.” She steps to him, reaches for him, her hand cradling the back of his head. He looks down at his hands but he cocks his head into her grip.

“Isn’t that the point of all this?” she says, voice just above a whisper. “Having someone. Loving someone.” She bends, presses her mouth against his temple, smoothes his hair with her hand. He reaches up and grips her wrist.

“We gotta share that weight, hon,” she says, and then he turns and kisses her.

It’s only fair, she thinks. She knows. He does the same for him, in all his small, aggravating ways. In all the desperately obvious ways he makes it known he wants to take care of her. 

“I’m a grown girl and I can take care of myself. I know what’s best for me,” she had said to him, their first fight.

He had said, earnest and sincere, “And I wanna know what’s best for you, too.” And, oh. Lou. A small grin cracked her face; she tried to smother, failed. He caught it all, could read her face better than anyone. Not that it was hard. 

For him, she is an open book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Betsy shovels the snow in the drive.

She pauses for breath when Lou comes out in his shirt sleeves and slippers, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. “What’re you doing?” he calls to her.

“What’s it look like, huh?” Her breath comes out in visible puffs, panting just a little. She’s worked up a sweat, below freezing temperatures be damned.

“I was gonna get to that, you know.”

She balances her elbow on the shovel’s handle and fixes him with a glare. “Like hell you were, what with your sciatica.”

“Oh, Christ. You make me sound halfway in the grave.”

She points at him as she starts again. “I let you have your way, and that’s what I’ll be digging next. Get inside, it’s cold out.”

He crosses his arms, takes a sip of his coffee. “I’m just waiting on you.”

“Stubborn as a mule,” she says under her breath, each word punctuated by the strike of the shovel into the icy snow. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They buy their first house and they move in, filling the rooms with secondhand furniture and future plans. In their new bedroom, Betsy and Lou prepare for bed. Betsy and Lou, she thinks, live here now. Betsy and Lou.

_I’m gonna marry that boy someday._

“Pretty good for a consolation prize, huh?” she says to him.

In the mirror she can see him behind her. His face goes tight and serious, his body perched on his side of the bed. “What are you talking about?”

She shrugs into the mirror and he watches her reflection. He says, “Come here,” real low and gentle. So she does.

He kisses her, good and fierce. Marriage is built on a great many things, but Betsy has found a large component of it is kissing just for kissing’s sake. Kissing because no one has discovered the language, found the words to match the earnestness and desperation beating in her heart.

“Good night, Mrs. Solverson,” he says against her mouth.

She grins and he must feel the bend of her smile because his mouth mirrors her own, their lips brushing. 

“Good night, Mr. Solverson,” she says. She reaches behind her blindly, refusing to take her eyes off of him, even for a second. She turns out the light.

“And all the ships at sea,” he says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A BRIEF MESSAGE FROM OUR NARRATOR ––

The clock on the wall ticked, the sound a quiet yet insidious metronome demanding if not respect then involuntary obedience. 

The waiting room at the doctor’s office was empty, save for her.

She imagined herself at a fork in the road, like the Robert Frost poem she had read so many years ago back in middle school. She imagined herself at an impasse, her life branching out in two directions – the life where she chose Lou, and the life without him. No, _chose_ was the wrong word. At no point did she ever feel there was a choice to be made. It was simply what she wanted versus everything else in the world. Why bother taking on everything else if you couldn’t have what you wanted? Where was the sense in that. It wasn’t a choice. There was nothing to be decided, nothing to doubt.

The clock ticked on the wall and her fingers paged through the magazine in her lap. She pictured Lou at the station and Molly at school. She waited.

An eternal, faithful optimist – there’s still time, she thought. There’s so much time. 

 

 

 


End file.
